Quote of the Day

"The president should remain Christian because we believe that Lebanon's characteristic and strength is in not differentiating between its Christians and Muslims." -- Saad Hariri.

Good one Mr. Hariri!

(from Naharnet)

Not all Women Are Equal?

A while ago, I mentioned a popular campaign for granting Lebanese women who are married to foreigners equal rights in terms of citizenship for their children. Current citizenship law states that any person born of a Lebanese father is entitled to citizenship.

A parliamentary committee has been set up to propose a change to the law. Now you might think, "why on earth do they need a committee to add two words to a law?" After all, all we need to fix this is add the words "or mother" to that law and all will be well.

Turns out, someone in the committee proposed adding an exception: Lebanese women married to Palestinian men. Their rationale is that allowing these women to give Lebanese citizenship to their children is essentially a form of "Tawteen" (Arabic for "nationalization" which has become a Lebanese political taboo word meaning granting citizenship to Palestinian refugees).

The weird thing is that opponents of this essentially racist exception aren't so much concerned with arguing that this exception is inherently wrong and unjust, but rather they are arguing that it isn't really necessary "protect" the Lebanese from Tawteen. So the committee, and this is the funny part, decided to conduct a survey to see how many Palestinian children might benefit from this law. You know... to see if there is a real risk of Tawteen.

It seems the committee has totally forgotten the reason they're doing what they're doing. The whole point of the amendment was to bring about equality in rights between Lebanese men and women. And although injustice against the Palestinians themselves in terms of their civil rights is far from uncommon in Lebanon, extending the inequality to include Lebanese nationals married to Palestinians is new. And quite scary. We're not even talking about equality between men and women anymore... We're talking about equality between Lebanese women, based on who they're married to.

It seems that for some people, avoiding Tawteen is more important than justice and equality. The fact that this is even a legitimate debate is shameful.

Info and photo from: Al-Akhbar (arabic).

Murder By Numbers

Israelis, Jews, and many others often find it extremely offensive to compare any contemporary event to the Holocaust. They often say it is an insult to the victims and survivors of the Nazi atrocities that left 6,000,000 dead. Those who don't find it offensive, would at least generally agree that it's far too much of a stretch to make such a comparison. Yet I often found myself arguing with seemingly sane people that killing 300 people, though horrible in and of itself, should not be compared to the Holocaust.

Today, however, Israeli rationalization of its current actions in Gaza has arguably reached (and exceeded) that level of exaggerated comparison. It has even brought the Holocaust within the scope of legitimate comparison.

More than two weeks into the conflict, with over 900 Palestinians killed, Israeli politicians, generals and even blog commenters maintain the same rationalization: That this war is a war of self-defense aimed at halting rocket fire from Hamas into Southern Israel. They describe world media as biased against Israel because they don't show the suffering of Israelis who have to live under the threat of Hamas rocket fire. But let's look at the numbers. So far, the "Gaza Op" has killed 900 Palestinians in 18 days, that's 50 per day. Hamas rocket fire since Israeli disengagement from Gaza 4 years ago (including the past two weeks) has killed 30 people, or 0.02 per day. That is to say, in terms of number of people killed per day, The Gaza operation is currently outperforming its cassus belli, namely Hamas's rocket launching campaign, by 2500 to 1. If that's not an outrageous comparison, I don't know what is.

To put it a way that makes these numbers mean something: Imagine if today Hamas suddenly unveils a massive war machine that it's been keeping hidden, waiting for the right moment, then launches a retaliatory attack on Israel in "self-defense." If it responds by killing 100000 Israeli's a day, it will be well within its right to defend itself, according how Israelis see that right. To make the point clearer, if Israel's logic holds, Hamas has the right to defend itself (if it could) by killing about 20 times more people per day than Hitler killed during the Holocaust.

So, mathematically speaking, comparing the Gaza op to Hamas's rocket fire is far more of a stretch than comparing the Holocaust to what is happening in Gaza today. What is even sicker is that, although no sane man would ever say the current Gaza op would justify another Holocaust, Israelis seem to have no trouble making that jump when it comes to their own self-defense.

"I Hate Syria" Is Not a Political Platform

It's election season in Lebanon, and what normal democracies expect from their politicians at a time like this is statements about their political platforms. We should expect to hear what they will do to make our lives better.

But in Lebanon these elusive platforms are all but missing from the political debate. And with our multi-party cabinet taking almost all its decisions unanimously, it is hard to see why we should vote for one party over another. Yesterday was the first time we saw a real disagreement in the cabinet over appointing the head of the election campaign supervisory committee. Al-Nahar reported that the opposition used its veto for the first time. (By the way this is simply not true. The question at hand was not one that opposition were allowed to veto: their veto only applies to decisions on "basic national matters," and the real reason the opposition's opposition influenced the final decision was that President Suleiman did not call for a vote until the opposition was satisfied (way to be neutral Mr. President)).

In any case, currently the choice of head for the election campaign supervisory committee is all we really have to go by when choosing who to vote for this year... Well, that and how much they like Syria. In fact, the Syria factor seems to be the core of the election campaign on both sides. With Jumblatt essentially telling us to vote for him or Ghazi Kanaan will come and eat our children at night, and Aoun going around telling us to vote for him so he can make love to Bashar Al-Asad more effectively, I wonder how the average non-affiliated Lebanese will be able to make a decision (if such a person exists at all).

But it's not completely hopeless, every once in a while we do hear some concrete ideas. Michel Aoun recently proposed a national defense strategy whereby resistance elements will be placed in villages and towns all over Lebanon creating something of a national militia, similar to Hezbollah's method, but nation-wide. I frankly think this is a terrible idea simply because I don't trust the Lebanese with weapon caches in their villages.

And just yesterday Aoun's arch-nemesis Geagea also teased us with a vague reference to his own national defense strategy that he intends to present at the next dialogue meeting. He makes an obscure reference to some strategy based on historic precedent namely, the case of Switzerland during World War II and how it managed to avoid attack. Great! Now as soon as Geagea clears his strategy up we will have two solutions to the same problem and we can vote based on whichever of these makes more sense to us...

Right?... Not exactly. From what I understand, the Swiss defense strategy is one of a nation-wide militia with every male citizen between the ages of 19 and 31 keeping a military rifle in their homes, ready to mobilize at a moment's notice. So is this what Geagea is gonna propose? (It's either that or that Lebanon should keep making economic concessions to our enemies and allow our banks to store Nazi gold, which is the only other reason why Switzerland wasn't attacked during the war.) But if this IS what he will propose, to me it sounds painfully similar to Aoun's proposal of a nation-wide Hezbollah-style defense militia.

So even on the most divisive issue, these two arch-enemies seem unable to present significantly different proposals to allow for decent electoral decision making. The only thing more depressing than that is that even with such similar initial proposals, the two sides will probably never agree.

So where does that leave us? Well it leaves us with an easy approach to decide who to vote for: grab the nearest picture of Bashar Al-Assad you can find, stare at it for a moment, if you suddenly feel afraid, angry, nauseous or generally uneasy, then you're better off voting for March 14, otherwise you might find it more suitable to vote for the Tayyar-Hezbollah group.

Black man in the White House

Well this blog is supposed to all about Lebanese politics, but let’s face it, who wants to hear about Hariri or Nasrallah today… Today and probably the next couple of weeks will be all about the new guy in the White House, even more so (if that is at all possible) than the previous weeks have been about who the new guy will be.

But this blog is also about my perspective on important issues, and in the spirit of this blog, I want to go all out and describe how I feel today to see, four to eight years from now, how right or wrong I was.

Experience has told me not to get excited when a new president is elected in the US. Many Lebanese and Arabs insist that all American presidents are the same; they only differ in how they choose to screw us. I remember eight years ago when we were hoping for a Bush victory against Gore, in fear that Gore will continue the pro-Israel policy of the Clinton administration. Until we realized, a few years later, that there is worse than a pro-Israel White House, and that’s an anti-Arab White House.

So experience tells me that I’m going out on a limb here when I say this: I am not only relieved Obama won in the sense that I’m glad it’s not McCain, I am actually genuinely happy, optimistic and downright cheerful. Some may think this is naïve, but I’m afraid I’ve been swept away by Obamania…

I had a hard time sleeping last night, waking up at 4 a.m. unable to bring myself to sleep until I turned on the TV, only for a minute, to see preliminary results showing Obama leading with around 200 electoral votes, McCain trailing behind with 90. I woke up in the morning and watched Obama’s 17 minute victory speech. I think this is the first time in my life I’ve ever gotten goose bumps listening to an American president speak.

How refreshing it was for me to hear from a US president (or president-elect in this case) a speech that spoke directly to the non-Americans offering a message of hope, and not in a do-what-I-tell-you-and-everything-will-be-fine kind of way.

“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

My message to the new Obama leadership is this:

I often hear of a time when America was a nation admired rather than feared, when American democracy was a source of inspiration rather than concern, when American values were sought rather than imposed. But I’m too young to remember any such time… I only hope I am young enough to see it happen again.

Request to Syria

Few months after President Suleiman visited Syria after an invitation delivered to him by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem, Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad officially announced t today the decision to establish diplomatic ties with Lebanon. This is a historic first as our two neighboring countries have never had such relations since both gained their independance in the 1940s.

The two countries now have to make a common declaration on the date the respective embassies would be opened, and they have to decide where each embassy will be located.

Finally, many Lebanese will have a place to vent their anger and hold anti-Syria demonstrations and sit-ins. So I ask Syria to consider this when picking a location and to pick a place with a really large parking lot, so demonstrators won't have to clog up the streets causing traffic jams everywhere around.

Photo by AP.

Headlines

It's always nice to point out when interesting headlines show up like this morning's Al-Mustaqbal article (found through 14march.org) about Jubran Bassil that quotes Bassil as saying:

When we talk about terrorism in Lebanon, we say it exists and that it is active in a specific region of the North, they say we are accusing the North of terrorism.

The headline of this article?

Genius son-in-law plays again on the sectarian chord and accuses the North of terrorism.

They sure proved him wrong!